Author: Bernard Henri Levy
Publication: The Wall Street Journal
Date: February 17, 2004
We observed the Abdul Qadeer Khan
affair, the incredible story of this Pakistani nuclear scientist who delivered
over 15 years -- freely and with impunity -- his most sensitive secrets
to Libya, Iran and North Korea. Then we learned that President Musharraf
in person, after an interview from which little or nothing has been divulged,
ended up granting Khan his "pardon." Case closed? End of story? That's
what the American administration, falling oddly in step with the official
Pakistani doctrine, would have us believe. But knowing something of the
case -- and being the first French observer, to my knowledge, to have tried
to alert public opinion to the extreme gravity of the situation --
I believe that we are only at the very beginning this story.
* * *
Far from ending on Sept. 11, 2001
-- the day, we are told, on which "the world changed" -- this terrifying
nuclear traffic continued until well after: A last trip to Pyongyang, his
thirteenth, was made in June 2002 by the good doctor Khan; not to mention
the ship inspected last August in the Mediterranean, transporting elements
of a future nuclear plant to Libya. The eyes of the world, emulating the
eyes of America, were fixed on Baghdad, while the tentacles of nuclear
proliferation were being extended from Karachi.
We will soon learn that far from
being the overexcited, but in the end isolated, "Dr. Strangelove" that
most of the press has described, Khan was at the center of an immense network,
an incredibly dense web. There were Dubai front companies, meetings in
Casablanca and Istanbul with Iranian colleagues, complicities in Germany
and Holland, Malaysian and Philippine agents, and detours through Sri Lanka,
with Chinese and London connections -- a world of crime and dirty war that
the West, mired in a big game that is beginning to get ahead of it, has
so blithely allowed to develop.
We will find that, since Pakistan
is steered by the iron hand of its secret service and its army, it is inconceivable
that Khan operated alone without orders or cover. We will understand more
precisely that we cannot repeat without contradiction that, on the one
hand, the Pakistani nuclear arsenal is under control, and that not a warhead
can budge without the authorities' knowledge, and, on the other, that Khan
was acting alone, working on his own account, with no official connivance.
To put it simply and disconcertingly: Pakistan's nuclear weapons need to
be secured. They cannot -- will not -- be secured by Pakistan alone.
We will come back to Gen. Musharraf
-- and Pakistan being what it is, we will come back also to other generals
and ex-generals, such as Mirza Aslam Beg and Jehangir Karamat, both former
army chiefs of staff. But we must not shift our gaze from the president
himself, whose knowledge of Khan's dark machinations no one in Islamabad
doubts, and who, at the very moment of his confounding, celebrated Khan
once more as a "hero." What does Khan know of what Gen. Musharraf knows?
And what does Khan's daughter, Dina, who announced in London that she has
suitcases of compromising files, know?
And at last, sooner or later, we
will come to the real secret: that of al Qaeda; and of Khan's links to
Lashkar-e-Toiba, the fundamentalist terrorist group at the heart of al
Qaeda; and the fact that this "mad scientist" is first of all mad about
God, a fanatical Islamist who in his heart and soul believes that the bomb
of which he is the father should belong, if not to the Umma itself, at
least to its avant-garde, as incarnated by al Qaeda. So let us not shrink
from measuring the probability of a nightmare scenario: to wit, a Pakistani
state which -- in the shelter of its alliance with an America that
is decidedly not counting inconsistencies -- could furnish al Qaeda with
the means to take the ultimate step of its jihad.
How much time will it take for all
this to be said? How much longer will Islamabad's masquerade endure? Next
month the American Congress will vote on the question of three billion
dollars in aid to Pakistan: Will this aspect of things be taken into account?
Will demands be made, at last, in exchange for this aid, for inspections
of Pakistani sites, as well as the installation of a double-key system
-- a system that some of us here in Europe have been calling for?
These are just a few elements I
offer -- as part of a debate that has scarcely begun.
Mr. Levy is the author, most recently,
of "Who Killed Daniel Pearl?" (Melville House, 2003).